Tied by more than profession

4:56 PM,
Dec. 27, 2012

Written by

David M. Shribman

Perhaps the all-time champion center of serendipity was an old Battle Creek, Mich., sanitarium presided over by members of the Kellogg family before being converted during World War II into the Percy Jones Army Hospital. That's when the hospital, which had once treated Mary Todd Lincoln and Sojourner Truth and went on to be ridiculed in a T. Coraghessan Boyle novel, became the home of two remarkable Army men who had suffered grievous war wounds.

On just one floor of a hospital so big it once had 800 employees were Robert Joseph ...